Science Fiction Though the Decades

Friday, May 31, 2013

H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds (1897) was my introduction to both the bibliography of Wells and 19th
century science fiction. I felt immersed in the familiar world of southwestern
London (a map kindly provided here). While the “fiction” part of the novel was
a fantastic story in itself, the non-fictional inclusion to the plot won me
over. It was a sensation mix even though I wasn’t personally familiar with the
geography of England.

Here in his Selected Short
Stories, the non-fictional portions of each story lend an extra sense of
earthly-ness, but it doesn’t take precedence over each story as much as The
War of the Worlds; rather, in this collection, the steady stream of ideas
is what captures the reader’s heart. This captivating aura of each story is
assisted by the optimistic vision of industrialism and scientific progress.
This sense of positivity and advancement isn’t dulled by the repetitive delivery
of each story: storytelling in the most classic sense.

This 1958 publication, with 21 stories,
draws stories from a much lengthier collection entitled The Short Stories of
H. G. Wells from 1927, containing 63 stories. The stories within date from
1894 to 1921, but most date from pre-1900. Regardless of the century-plus age
of these stories… they remain timeless.

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The Time Machine (novel, 1895) – 5/5
– The Time Traveler, as he is known to the narrator, constructs a miniature model
of a time traveling machine. His skeptical guests ponder upon the displacement
of the tested machine, perhaps the victims of a slight of hand or some other
tomfoolery. Yet, when the narrator and other guests return to the man’s house
for a dinner party, they are met by the same man, yet this time disheveled,
bloodied, and with an appetite of a waking bear. Could the glimpsed majestic
machine, the “time machine”, actually be the real deal? The story spun by the
Time Traveler is very detailed, lending it to credibility if it weren’t for the
exotic claims forwarded by the Traveler.

The Time Traveler is optimistic of
the progression of Man, so he takes his machine to the far future. During his
voyage through time, he witnesses, albeit at a very accelerated rate which
blurs past him, an England which builds up and up. Eventually, in the year
802,701 A.D., the Traveler stops his machine at the base of an enigmatic statue
surrounded by lush forest and sentinel-like hills. The drastic difference of
the reality compared to his expectation doesn’t immediately upset him.

The simple, curious, lithe, and
innocent citizens of the surface of earth are friendly yet detached from the
sudden appearance of the Time Traveler. He considers the people’s progression
from technologically-oriented to one of bucolic harmony-orientation. He’s
comfortable with the idyllic lifestyle until the disappearance of his time
machine. The Eloi are disinterested in his loss, yet cower at the coming of
dusk; the Time Traveler ponders if the dark harbors a manifestation of this
fear.

He soon discovers a labyrinth
beneath the plush, wooded surface, an underground world shut out from the
piercing rays of sunlight and enveloped in a cloak of darkness which the
Morlocks call home. These creatures, as human as the Eloi yet more visually regressive
to animal form, stalk the meek human on the surface; the Time Traveler’s time
in the caverns is limited for good reason, but the presence of throbbing
machinery and prandial carnivorousness are an interesting contrast the Eden of
the Eloi.

Eventually befriending a svelte,
young Eloi for himself, the Time Traveler feels better equipped to explore the
more mysterious buildings of the hills, one of which houses an ancient museum.
Reliving history through the halls of technology, the Time Traveler feels the
pang of nostalgia amid the verdant brush and sun kissed landscape. He becomes determined
to find his machine, advance further into the future for a glimpse of things to
come, and return to his laboratory to spin his extraordinary yarn. 75 pages

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The Lord Ironclads (novelette, 1903)
– 4/5 – An artist and war correspondent view a trench war from the side of the
simple peasants. Prepared with rifles and howitzers, the army lies in their
trenches expecting their enemy to attack from their own trenches; yet large
dark figures are witnessed on the enemy’s horizon. Some of these machines
advance with lethal intent and accuracy, overpowering the villagers and turning
a war into a one-sided slaughter; the headlines will read, “Mankind versus
Ironmongery”. 22 pages

The Door in the Wall (shortstory,
1906) – 3/5 – What begins as a childish tale of fantasy and secrets becomes so
much more convincing when the storyteller dies under strange circumstances:
walking through a door which led nowhere but down. The tale spun relates to a
childhood memory of a fantastic garden with playmates and emotional umbrage,
all accessed by a door which is invisible to all else. Through the bard’s life,
the same door appears but he ignores its draw… so he laments. 17 pages

The Country of the Blind (novelette,
1904) – 5/5 – Ascending an unclimbed peak deep in the Andes mountains, Munez
stumbles at night and falls down a series of slopes to softly land on a
forested plateau. Below, he discovers a community of blind villagers shut off
from the outside world. Reciting his mantra of “In the County of the Blind the
One-Eyed Man is King”, Munez is frustratingly unable to overpower the perfectly
adapted blind villagers. His ability to “see” is symptomatic of insanity, says
the village doctor. 24 pages

The Stolen Bacillus (shortstory,
1894) – 4/5 – Showing of his laboratory to an interested admirer of bacteria
and science, one bacteriologist throws in a shade of bravado before he realizes
that his guest has slipped away with the bravado bacteria itself—cholera!
Fleeing in pursuit without hat or slippers, the man hails a cab to chase the
thief down, and the bacteriologist’s wife chases her husband with hat and
slippers in tow. The visitor accidently breaks the phial and assigns himself to
Anarchist martyrdom. 7 pages

The Diamond Maker (shortstory, 1894)
– 3/5 – Drained from work and loathe of additional work or entertainment, a man
takes a respite to the riverside where another man, of ragged appearance and
defeated will, spins a story of diamond making. His dangerous method in his
Kentish Town flat runs akin to bomb making, so after two years of growing his
prized diamonds, the diamond maker is on the run and desperate to sell his
“hot” diamonds, yet £100 is too steep for the tired man. 8 pages

Aepyornis Island (shortstory, 1894)
– 4/5 – Butcher had gone to Madagascar to find the remains of an Aepyornis
bird. Having been extinct for nearly one thousand years, only the bones and
eggs remain in the salty swamps of the northern delta. He’s able to retrieve
three eggs but a series of unfortunate events leaves him with one egg, alone,
and on a nearly deserted isle. For two years, the bird kept him company and
grew to fourteen feet; but back home, he expects compensation for his duty. 12
pages

The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s
Eyes (shortstory, 1895) – 3/5 – In a freak laboratory accident, Davidson lost
his sense of vision; however, his vision was replaced by that of the sight of
another man on a ship and, later, on an island. Davidson’s other senses were
grounded in the reality of Harrow Technical College, but eventually the
divergent sensory input lapses back to his normal vision in patchy foci. His
experience in remote viewing is bolstered by a visiting sea captain. 10 pages

The Lord of the Dynamos (shortstory,
1894) – 5/5 – The Camberwell dynamo station is run by the slightly sadistic,
borderline belligerent man James Holroyd and his noble savage Azuma-zi. The hum
and throb of the dynamo offers a stark contrast to the idle Buddha statues of
Rangoon, so the savage whispers to the Dynamo, asking for signs and begging for
omens. His sacrifice to the Dynamo God is the life of James, a crime which his
superiors attribute to suicide. 9 pages

The Plattner Story (shortstory,
1896) – 2/5 – A greenish powder from a local kiln is tested under amateur
scientific experimentation by the Modern Languages Master of a small private
school in the south of England. The resulting explosion leaves no trace of the
man for nine days until he unexpectedly drops upon the school’s principal. Mr.
Plattner, the Language Master, tells a bizarre tale of experiencing a reverse
polarity world and has, since his return, had his body laterally reversed. 19
pages

The Argonauts of the Air
(shortstory, 1895) – 3/5 – Monson’s Flying Machine has been under construction
for five years and though its namesake suggests it actually flies, in reality
the massive construction project is still amid its metallic scaffolding.
Tourists take the train through the project, gawking at its grandeur while
journalists mock the once multimillionaire and his grounded money pit. Sick of
the bad press and desperate for success while so close to being broke, he
finally sets flight. 12 pages

In the Abyss (shortstory, 1896) – 3/5
– Five miles above the floor of the Atlantic Ocean rests the exploration ship Ptarmigan,
her crew, a nine-foot iron sphere and its passenger to the deep—Elstead. While
the crew debate the sphere’s safety, Elstead is confident of his design and so
descends to the unknown depths with only one last resort for escape—up. His
tardy return to the surface is accompanied by Elstead’s amazing tale. 16 pages

Under the Knife (shortstory, 1896) –
5/5 – Morose as to his coming surgery, an emotionally despondent man rationalizes
his detachment and hypothesizes about the attendance of his funeral; the low
projection has no input on his psyche. At his surgery while under the
anesthetic of chloroform, the man feels his body detach from his ascending
extra-corporeal self. His physical death is superseded by his ascension into
the vacuous heavens, where the universe’s reality isn’t what it seems. 13 pages

The Sea Raiders (shortstory, 1896) –
3/5 – The Haploteuthis ferox species of octopus
reigns the deep sea where it battles whales yet is ignorant of humanity’s
presence on the ocean’s shores… until the day they swarm offshore of Sidmouth,
taking the life of a youth and whetting their appetite for human flesh. Mr.
Jennings is the man who is beset by the advancing creatures yet escapes, sounds
the alarm, and rallies a counterattack. 10 pages

The Cone (shortstory, 1895) – 3/5 – Raut
is a man impressed with the effect of nature on man, how the moon shines, and
how vibrant the viridity of the trees is; Horrocks, however, is an industrialist
who finds beauty in man’s own creations: steel mills, iron forges, and steam
trains. Raut is expecting Horrocks to show him the beauty which has escaped him
thus far. Horrocsk expects the tour to go smoothly, but doesn’t expect Raut of
perusing a personal agenda. 11 pages

The Purple Pileus (shortstory, 1896)
– 4/5 – Mr. Coombes is a man of virtue and tradition with a timed fuse for
those who counter his ways. Able to calm his previous grudges against his wife
and her parasitic friends for years, one monumental night he verbally lashes
out at them and storms out of his own house and into the forest. Unnerved into
despair, he seeks forms of suicide, the most agreeable of which being the
consumption of a mushroom patch. Rather than death, his spirits are lifted. 11
pages

The Grisly Folk (essay, 1921) – 3/5
– Mankind’s ascension to dominance on earth wasn’t without its epoch of
struggle. A handful of sub-human races posed a threat to mankind’s existence,
so they were systematically killed to make way for the expansion of man’s
generational lineage, ideal, and customs. The flints of the technological
progress of man and the other vanquished races stand testament to the size,
importance, and struggle of the early diaspora. 14 pages

The Man Who Could Work Miracles
(shortstory, 1898) – 5/5 – An argumentatively assertive man, yet innocuous in
most ways, is debating the inexistence of so-called miracles. Hypothesizing the
impossibility of a lantern burning upside down, the very lantern flips and
burns as normal, much to everyone’s amazement. Fortheringay tests his new
miraculous prowess by having candles, diamonds, and fishbowls materialize.
Consulting the chaplain Mr. Maydig, the two test his powers on the worldly
scale. 17 pages

The Truth About Pyecraft (shortstory,
1903) – 5/5 – Formalyn’s great-grandmother was of pure South Indian stock and
bequeathed an array of odd potions for various ailments and magic. When
Formalyn enters the smoking room of a club, an obese man instantly attaches to
him, cajoling him into plying his secret elixir to cure his weight problem. Working
through the proper translation of the correct potion, Pyecraft hunts down the
ingredients but berates Formalyn for the unexpected success and consequences. 21
pages

Jimmy Goggles the God (shortstory,
1898) – 4/5 – A man dons his masked and weighted diving suit, which the
three-man crew man have dubbed Jimmy Goggles. Submerged off a Papuan island
looking for gold treasure in a shipwreck, the man sees his two crewmen sink to
the ocean floor with spears through their bodies. His only path of escape is
walking up the seabed’s incline to the nearest island, where the sight of his
mechanical diving suit causes the savages to prostrate before him. His four
months of godliness end with a missionary. 21 pages

The New Accelerator (shortstory,
1901) – 4/5 – Professor Gibberne is a wonder with pharmaceutical alchemy and he
hopes to produce an accelerant for the whole body rather than one that only
affects one or two systems. His end product is an accelerant for the human body
that amplifies all sensations by 1,000-fold. Unhappy with being limited to the
home, the professor and his friend take to the streets to observe life in slow
motion—bees, an orchestra, a cyclist, and the neighbor’s infernally yapping
dog. 14 pages

Monday, May 27, 2013

Aside from Eric Brown, I can’t
name any respectable modern authors who can push out two novels a year. John
Brunner was prolific in the 1960s and 1970s, Greg Bear had two novels published
in 1985, and Joe Haldeman had two novels publish in 1983. But since this time,
I can’t point to any respectable author which has a consistent turnout of two
novels per year. If you disregard the adjective “respectable”, one could
include Kevin J. Anderson in this affair, but his inclusion is any list besides
“Authors I Avoid” is a dubious distinction (averaging 3.54 novels per year
since 2000).

Eric Brown, however, has produced two novels in one year on four
occasions:Penumbra
and Walkabout (1999), New
York Dreams and Bengal Station (2004),Xenopath
and Necropath (2009), andThe Devil’s Nebula and Helix Wars (2012).

Here in 2013, Eric Brown is
again publishing two new novels; on May ninth he released a
stand-alone featured here, The Serene Invasion, and on July thirtieth he’ll release Satan’s Reach, a sequel to The Devil’s Nebula. While
he matches the quantitative definition of success, Brown has been letting me
down on the qualitative side. He is a cauldron of ideas akin to Brian Aldiss or
John Brunner, but his books tend to be more longer yet more mediocre. But with
the drought of decent new novels published every year (eons of pain waiting for
Banks, Reynolds, and Hamilton, mainly), I look to Eric Brown for a spritz of
modern sci-fi. Thankfully, The Serene Invasion delivers, albeit after a
bumpy ride.

Rear cover synopsis:

“In 2025, the Serene arrive
from Delta Pavonis V, and change mankind’s destiny forever. The gentle aliens
bring peace to an ailing world—a world riven by war, terrorism and poverty, by
rising conflicts over natural resources—and offer an end to need and violence. But
not everyone supports the seemingly benign invasion. There are those who
benefit from conflict, who cherish chaos, and they will stop at nothing to
bring back the old days.

When Sally Walsh is kidnapped
by terrorists and threatened with death, it seems that only a miracle can save
her life. Geoff Allen, photojournalist, is contacted by the Serene and offered
the opportunity to work with the aliens in their mission. For Sally, Geoff, and
billions of other citizens of Earth, nothing will ever be the same again…”

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In northern desert plains of
Uganda, Sally Walsh is a doctor on a humanitarian mission healing the ill of
the impoverished region, but much of her disheartening work is caring for the
dead rather than the recovering. Contemplating an early retirement after five
years, Sally is kidnapped with her colleague by extremists from the Sudanese
border. If she and Ben can survive the ordeal through common sense, Sally is
assured of her retirement, but the radical ideas of the extremists have one
mission: the beheading of the infidels. Ben’s head is literally on the chopping
block and a gun is pointed at Sally, but the impulse to kill either is
vanquished by, what seems at the time to be, a miracle.

Geoff Allen is aboard a flight
from London to Entebbe to see Sally while on a photojournalism jaunt to capture
images of elephants in the wild. He’s abruptly stricken with a sense of time
lag, followed by a hallucination of being laid out, examined, implanted with a
device in his skull, and told “Do not be afraid” (53). Surfacing from his
torpid state, Geoff realizes that he alone experiencedthe time lag, yet far below the plane on the
African desert are enigmatic domes. Common sense suggests blaming the Chinese.

All around the world, the urge
to commit acts of violence with met with a sudden lapse in muscle control; wars
cease, hate crimes halt, and even suicides stutter to an unfulfilled desire.
Suddenly at 11:31 GMT, Eight starships appear in the skies of earth, silent in
their spectacle and mysterious in their silence. Their point of convergence
seems to be an isolated region on the deserts of Mali; ground zero is an arid
wasteland with no significance to the human race. The ships join in a massive
snowflake-shaped ensemble and send an intense beam downwards to the desert,
from which springs an oasis of flora and fauna unknown since the myth of Eden.

Soon, Geoff Allen and 9,999
others like him congregate at the request of the peaceful invaders. The aliens
from Delta Pavonis V, representatives of a scare but benevolent race called the
S’rene, have a message for the selected few of earth, chosen for their humanity
and empathy:

We are intervening here on Earth because your
race has, in the past few hundred years since what you term your industrial revolution,
grown exponentially, a growth fuelled by a fatal combination of political greed
and lack of foresight. What is even more tragic in your situation is that many
of you—both on an individual level and on that of institutions—know very well
what needs to be done in order to prevent a global catastrophe, but cannot
enact change for the better because power and vested interest rest in the hands
of the few ….No shame should accrue in light of these facts; no individual is
really at fault. The process was vastly complex and incremental, a slow-motion,
snowballing suicide impossible to stop. A hundred, thousand races across the
face of the galaxy have perished in this way, before we had the wherewithal to
step in and correct the aberrant ways of emerging races. (161-162)

“The galaxy teems with life,
with civilizations, a concordance rich beyond your imagination” (139) yet not
everyone on Earth is especially happy with the inescapable non-violence—mainly
the makers of arms, the war machines, and, above all, James Morwell Jnr., owner
the American corporate entity of Morwell Enterprises. In addition to the
complete cessation of arms sales and the resulting dive in his company’s stock,
James is also unable to partake in his form of pleasure: masochism. For this,
he damns the passive aliens and establishes a digital community of directed
distrust of the S’rene. Coddling James’ hatred for the Serene are the opponent
alien species, the domineering Obterek, who contact James and supply him with
five devices which enable them to “read” the minds of any human Serene representative
they can find; however, the representatives are not easily tracked and the
Serene are not easily defeated. The two races have been at odds for millennia and
each knows the other’s weaknesses.

The representatives of the
Serene describe themselves as “self-aware entities” and are “living, biological
beings, self-aware, individual, conscious” (171) but grown and programmed with
the interests of the Serene, their mentor race and benevolent saviors. The
honor of meeting a living Serene is a rare occurrence as they are spread across
the many light-years and none are found in Earth’s realm. Their projects for
the human race include terraforming Mars and Venus, yet at the edge of the
solar system, an aberration in the occlusion of some stars causes concern for
astronomers and the pessimists.

By 2035, the people have Earth
have grown use to the munificent offerings of the S’rene; kilometer tall towers
of habitation spire above urban landscapes, oases of paradise dot the most
desolate regions of terrain, and the aliens maintain they have “the best
interests of the human race at heart” (475). The 10,000 or so human representatives,
less now because serving the interests of the Serene is always an option, are
subsumed for two days per month on mysterious duties related to the Serene
Invasion. With no memory of their two-day duty, speculation of the Serene’s
greater intentions is at the top of some representatives’ minds while others exalt
the invader’s benevolence and ignore any doubts.

Eventually, the Obterek are able to penetrate
the quantum-state of the Serene’s non-violence sphere around Earth, resulting
in an outright assault by the neon blue bipedal figures of the Obterek and
dozens of human victims. Yet, the golden hued translucent bodies of the “self-aware
entities” to the scene, entomb the human victims within themselves, and heal
them in the giant ebon obelisks which tower above every major city. At the same
time, the Serene also penetrate the bodies of their militaristic opponents,
stopping the carnage and saving every human life at the scene.

Even in 2045, with twenty years
of serenity on Earth, the peacefulness has spread to the colonies of Mars,
moons, and asteroids. Humanity expands and flourishes under matriarchal supervision,
but the Obterek are not without their ploys to subvert the progress. Dreams of human
utopia seem to be realized with nations dissolving, selfish interests waning,
and self-righteous exfoliating from the human ego:

They worked together increasingly without the
boundaries of nations to impede progress with concerns of petty national
interest, freed from the malign influence of multinational business corporations.
Religions had mellowed even the more radial sects of Christianity and Islam
which in the past had threatened head-to-head conflict; millions still
believed, but without the self-righteous fervor of old. New cults had sprung
up, many with the Serene at their core. Of the old faiths, Buddhism was
increasing in popularity, as citizens drew parallels between the ways of the
Serene and the philosophy of Siddhartha Gautama. (459-460)

Still, the humans, and the
10,000-odd representatives among, question whether the Serene have any ulterior
motives and whether the Obterek represent a legitimate opposition to the
efforts of the Serene. Perhaps humanity isn’t destined to populate the galaxy,
their local stars, or even their home system.

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I was chary of the effectiveness
of novel’s theme: aliens come to Earth and save humanity from their human
nature. The caginess validated itself in the first 300-400 pages of the novel
where various predictable elements manifested themselves: an unforeseen alien adversary
(Obterek) and a skeptical human with the power to influence others (James).
Surely, these two forces would join to attempt a disestablishment of the Serene
presence, somehow parry the quantum-state non-violence enforcement, and
ultimately allow for the Obterek to “supplant the Serene” (435).

Then the last 100 pages started
to expand on the efforts of the Serene to establish humanity amid their solar system
with colonization of numerous celestial bodies. The 20-30 years of serenity had
failed to produce a single human-on-human act of violence; therefore, their
initial intention of creating a non-violent humanity had been successful and
who are the puny humans to question the “authority” of a non-violence which
their own religions stipulate in their respective texts. Eventually, the habit
of tranquility mutes any sensation of contempt or ungratefulness; allow the
humans a period of adjustment and the consistency of habit and they’ll follow
you anywhere. The Serene read the humans perfectly… after all, they had over a
hundred years with which to observe us in situ.

But Serene Invasion isn’t
about creating a human utopia or peopling the orbiting bodies of sol; Serene
Invasion is about acceptance and forgiveness. Over time, Sally is able to
forgive her captor; Ana, an Indian woman and part of the human representative body,
is able to forgive her brother’s desertion; and again, Sally is able to forgive
the subterfuge which her friend Kath has led her through for most of her life.
These characters accept, forgive, progress, and succeed while adjusting to all
scenarios. Then there’s James who doesn’t forgive his abusive father, doesn’t
forgive the Serene for disallowing him to commit suicide, and doesn’t forgive
his assistant for treachery and abandonment. Predictably yet suitably, his fate
isn’t as glamorous or glorious as the those with peace of mind. While the
aliens are able to enforce a physical peace in society’s eye, it’s up to the individual
human to achieve peace of mind.

Serene’s blanket non-violence
isn’t without its controversy, however. James takes it upon himself to somehow undermine
the quantum-state aura of non-violence so that he may achieve a small victory
against the Serene: violence against self, the death of self through suicide.
The Serene deprive humanity of this last grip of self-control, the control of
one’s fate at one’s own hand. James takes his idea to the extreme: isolating himself
asea with no provisions, walking in the Amazon without heed to heat, thirst,
hunger or danger, and free soloing a rock edifice with a gun in hand (this
method abusing the Serene’s intervention of “spasming” when committing
violence). But the omniscience of the serene invaders quash his attempts and
fuel his commitment to their defeat.

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Serene Invasion, regardless of its utopian aim and
predictable elements of confrontation, comes out extolling positive human
virtues and shining optimism in parallel to Alastair Reynolds’ Blue Remembered Earth (2012). The novel exhibits the common, yet typically suppressed,
human emotions of forgiveness and virtue over those more flamboyant and cynical
kneejerk reactions of pessimism, suspicion, and illogical obduracy. The Serene’s
blanket issue of non-violence isn’t without flaw; while the Obterek orate the
of the Serene using the humans to spread “their own unnatural edicts, their own
perverted ideals” (435), humanity must take what it can get, take the lesser of
two evils: possible self-destruction through mankind’s own during or guided
like a child to an earthly utopian diaspora, albeit without control over one’s
own life, suicide or not.

Serene Invasion doesn’t ooze as much emotion as The Fall
of Tartarus (2005), but it does give the reader more room for reflection upon the standards
by which we judge benevolence, generosity, self-directed volition of self and
society, and, most importantly, of doubting the hand that feeds you:

There is nothing
more dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates people. It is a poison
that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations. It is a thorn
that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills. --- Siddhartha Gautama

Monday, May 20, 2013

There used to be one well-placed
second-hand bookstore in Bangkok which had a rather poor selection of books,
and pricey ones at that. But, one goes to second-hand bookstores for the sight
of the thousands of books and the unique musty smell which hangs in the air.
Before the store started to sell solely second-hand Japanese books, I poked my
head in and couldn’t resist buying at least one book. That purchase became
Thomas R. McDonough’s The Architects of Hyperspace. I must have been inebriated. Oh, dear.

McDonough has made two forays
into novel-length science fiction, with The Architects of Hyperspace
being his awkward first time. This was published once back in 1987 in
paperback. The end… almost, because it was “back in print” in 2000 by the
author’s fancy through some sort of self-publication website. Fast forward to
1992 and McDonough offers his sophomore novel, The Missing Matter, which
becomes book #3 of the quadrilogy of The Next Wave. Supposedly, these books saw
the light of day.

Rear cover synopsis:

“In a battered starship manned
by two rugged adventurers, Ariadne Zepos heads for the alien world where her
father perished twenty years before. Determined to unravel the mystery of his
last message, she charts a dangerous course, unaware of intergalactic pirates
bent on subverting her mission. To survive, she will have to conquer a world of
unfathomable complexity constructed by a long-vanished race around a neutron
star. Seductively beautiful, yet brimming with deadly traps, it holds the
secret Ariadne seeks—one that will lead her to a far greater mystery.”

------------

Having lost her father 20 years
prior, Ariadne Zepos maintains that he died on a space mission and never heard
from again. The pang of the early-childhood loss follows her through life until
the day when a message is received from deep space. The message, sent from 20
light-years out, is intended for Ariadne’s audience. The shock of learning of
her father’s true fate fills her with a hope for revisiting the circumstances
of his mysterious disappearance, but there are minions of repression behind
every move she makes.

Stefan is one man on Earth whom
she thinks she can rely on, what with his job in the Ministry of Culture. However,
he manipulates the amount of red tape needed to secure a starship and
suppresses Ariadne’s urgent need of discovery. Ariadne has know-how and
know-who limitations, but she still manages to find her way off of Earth, yet
Stefan’s crony Wolf is close on her tail.

Once in the asteroid belt, she
contacts the once person who her father said she could definitely rely on, the
roider named Sean O’Shaughnessy. Sean and his posh English partner in petty space
crime, Plum, are hesitant to equip themselves for a 20 light-year mission by a
simple whim of Ariadne. Like Ariadne, their resources are limited and the whole
idea of an adventure into the unknown unnerves them. Soon, the verbal recriminations
of Wolf urge them to leave the asteroids at all cost, a pressure backed by Wolf’s
booby traps on their spacecraft. With the physical booby trap disabled, the
trio—Ariadne, Sean, and Plum—engage their hyperdrive to the required distance,
only to return to normspace around a dangerous white dwarf. They realize Wolf
tampered with their computer and Sean must pull them out of certain death if Ariadne
is to further delve into her father’s disappearance.

Safe once again and away from
the star’s well of gravity, the ship re-enters the 65th dimension of
hyperspace to the exact coordinates of the message’s source point. There they
find a massive system of tubular rings which surround a neutron star, a
physical feat which the humans find impossible yet their very eyes stand
witness to the architectural wonder. With each successive ring spinning faster
and faster, the ship is only able to dock with the outermost ring. There, they
find her father’s ship with his insightful data, maps, and suggestions… but
Stefan’s ship also occupies the docking bay. The treacherous “friend” of Ariadne
has beat them to it. The trio are more concerned with the perils of the rings
rather than the intentions of their human rivals.

The thousand-year-old relic of
a vanished species is full of enticing mysteries, but these same obscure
functions within each ring also present unforeseen dangers to the explorers.
With the accurate data provided by her father, Ariadne leads the two men
further into the depths of the rings. There, they eventually meet Stefan and
his crew held captive behind an invisible field. The ingenuity of the Sean
reaps the reward of domination over the treacherous crew at the cost of their
freedom; the uneasiness which penetrates the new group is occasionally broken
by the illustrious words of the journobot, an entity which captures the moment
through an objective sense of duty, yet leaning in favor towards the brave yet disloyal
actions of Stefan.

Through mechanical
monstrosities and wily wildlife, the group get cut down by a number of unexpected
deaths by the rings’ many perils until they reach Ring 512, the terminal ring
which is closest to the neutron star. The floor of the ring orbits just above
the surface of the star and offers an amazing view though the starquakes upset
the stability of their foothold. Descending into the corridor, Ariadne discovers
her father’s final message, one which imbues her hesitant dread. Regardless,
the growing relationship between the stereotypical Irishman, Sean, and the
puritan goodie two-shoes, Ariadne, spur them to take the final step into solving
the mystery of her father, the mystery of the rings, and the mystery of the
vanished race which constructed them.

------------

A preposterous quote from
Charles Sheffield, on the very cover of the novel, states that Thomas R.
McDononough is the “Jules Verne of the ‘80s!” Poppycock. While both Verne and
McDonough may be adventure writers and proponents of science, Verne instills a
sense of naïve wonder, limitlessness, and a love for the journey rather than
the destination; McDonough, on the other hand, pushes and pushes for the
destination and loses himself along the way, forgetting to metaphorically smell
the roses. Any sort of originality which springs up is dulled by the ham-fisted
fits of so-called humor and a preoccupation to inject prefixes to make the
novel more sci-fi-ish.

I never understood the motivation of the
characters to stay put in the gigantic alien relic, home to unknown dangers and
organisms, rather than return to Earth to report their findings. They keep
sinking deeper into the structure without heed to a proper human exploration.
It’s frustrating to see Plum, the intelligent English gent, say, “There are too
many tantalizing mysteries here for us to just abandon it when everything’s
going so well” (146). I understand Ariadne’s desire to solve her father’s
disappearance, but the weighty significance of the relic to humankind’s
progress overshadows any selfish intention which they had as precursor to the
adventure.

McDonough must have had fun
writing this novel, throwing caution to the wind and chucking in everything he
thought that would make a good novel: cheesy humor, scientific lingo, guns and booze,
eccentric robot, and a computer which takes no responsible for its actions.
Some of the passages are so stereotypically geeky that they make me cringe: “Evidently
it is some microscopic or submicroscopic nonlinear ultrasonic vibration, as was
surmised” (124). Justifying a technology through scientific wordiness? Very,
very amateur.

Another amateurish stab at
making the novel more user-friendly (?) is McDonough’s prefix- and suffix-ophilia.
Nearly every page has some sort of word which has a lame, obvious prefix/suffix
attached to it. Whether tounge-in-cheek or born from ignorance, McDonough even
writes a line for Ariadne saying, “One can’t simply go around breaking English
words in two and sticking pieces together at random” (175). For ease of
annoyance, I have provided five categories for the prefixed/suffixed words
along with an additional miscellaneous category, and ask yourself, “Do these
words improve my reading experience?”:

Two last eye-rolling inclusions
which McDonough must have thought important to the development of the novel are
the noxious mild oaths (reminiscent of Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia [1975] mild
oath of “Hot buttered moonbeam!”). McDonough likes to use “taxing” as one oath
which reflects the asteroid miners' dislike for Earth’s bureaucracy, “moon dust”
is also popular when describing something as worthless and plentiful, and there
is religiously affiliated homage to Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger. All of these are odd eccentricities of
McDonough’s which do not enrich the narrative experience the least bit; if
anything, they are just silly and distracting rather than original and
substantial.

After 260 pages, the novel ends
in a predictive manner when opposites attract: the puritan Ariadne hooks up
with borderline-hedonistic Sean to explore what lies beyond the endpoint of the
system of rings around the neutron star. Within that door is the conclusion to
their search, and while the unlikely-yet-predictable duo is gag-worthy, what
they find is pretty interesting, ties up things nicely, and has larger
implications. Aside from the non-dynamic duo, the book ends on a high note
which McDonough suffocates with 5 pages of afterword. Damn.

------------

This is a great example of “How
Not to Write a Science Fiction Novel” and should be required-reading for anyone
wishing to write science fiction: your idiosyncratic additions to the pages are
just that—personal adornment—; don’t fall victim to stereotypes and do not,
please do not, make opposites attract; don’t make the story more scientific than
it needs to be, whether that includes real science or pseudoscience prefixes;
and don’t fluff yourself to be the stylistic heir of a great author when in
reality you’re a fledgling hack.